What is MenuMaker?

MenuMaker is a menu generation utility for X window managers on *NIX systems. It is capable of
finding lots of installed programs and generating a root menu
consistent across all supported X window managers, so one will get
(almost) the same menu no matter what window manager is
used.

Compatibility

MenuMaker is a 100% Python application. The minimum required Python version is 2.7; it should also run on Python 3.

Availability

Supported X window managers

Getting started

The easiest way is to get the source distribution, unpack it into a temporary directory and perform the usual sequence:

./configure && make && make install

It is not required however as MenuMaker runs off the source tree as well.
The MenuMaker's command-line driver is called mmaker.

The simplest MenuMaker invokation form is as follows:

mmaker your_window_manager

This command employs all available algorithms to find all installed
applications and dumps a fully usable and consistent menu into the
specified window manager’s default menu file.
For the full list of available options consult MenuMaker help:

mmaker --help

A few tips & hints

Verbosity is controlled via the -v option. Specify it twice to get tons of debug output. MenuMaker runs silently by default.

The default policy is not to overwrite any existing files so there is less chance to kill valuable hand-crafted menu. To force overwriting files use -f flag.

By default, MenuMaker generates fully formed and usable menu. To get only the part containing the applications found use -i flag. This output can be then #include’d into your custom frame menu. Note that this will not be a valid menu hence -c must also be specified (this is to forward the chunk to elsewhere).

By default, MenuMaker tries to eliminate the paths to executables
wherever possible (for example, when an application can be found in PATH). To suppress this and always retain full paths use -p flag. Useful for debugging.

To specify the terminal emulator to run console applications use -t flag.

Flags started with --no- disable specific search algorithms.

-s is used to specify unwanted categories to omit from menu.

MenuMaker can be run stright out of the unpacked tarball without installation.

Upon installation the local documentantion is available in Texinfo form and can be accessed from command line as follows: